St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Archive for the ‘web publishing’ Category

When talking about Search Engines with clients, trainees and others, it’s good to speak the same language.  Here’s a growing list of SEO terms and their definitions.  All you other Search Engine Marketers out there . . . Please contribute by commenting below.

• SEO
  • Search Engine Optimization:  The science/art of ranking well in the organic portion of a Search engines results page.
• IBL
  • InBound Link: A link to your web site from another web site (usually).  We could write a whole article about what makes a good IBL and a what makes a bad IBL and maybe we will, but not in this post…
  • A link can be considered an IBL if it comes from your own site if it’s written in an “absolute” versus “relative” manner.  This means the path, if absolute,  would begin with “http://”.
• SE
  • Search Engine
• SERP
  • Search Engine Results Page
• Key phrase (aka keyphrase)
  • A phrase typed into a search engines search box. It’s also called a search term. a search term may be only one word though, a phrase has to be more than one word.
• Purchase related key phrase
  • A key phrase with one or more of the words in it:
    • buy
    • store
    • price
    • purchase
    • or other synonyms for the above
• Bing:  The latest Search engine from Microsoft.
• Double Up:  When two pages from one site are listed one after another in a SERP.  The second is usually indented.  Yahoo pioneered the SERP double up.

I just published another Florida focused web site. This isn’t tightly focused on St. Petersburg but instead on the general FL market. And yes, to a search engine, FL is different than Florida, but their getting lots better. In fact if you search for most terms using FL, instead of Florida, just about everything you get will have the word Florida bolded in the descriptions and the url’s as well as the rare instances of the “word” FL. It’s good that that the SE’s are catching on more and more to the way people write and search. I’m guessing the competition from Bing has had a lot of influence on a lot of the fixes to long time flaws Google has made recently. Including the one where incoming links aren’t so important anymore and the words on the page are more important.

Anyway the new web site is targeting the Fl Fishing market, Read the rest of this entry »

This guy makes some great points about competing in the local search market. Remember, it is a competition, not an automatic thing. You’re not going to be automatically listed #1 on Google for Florida Web Design just because you submitted your web site to Google and you are actually in Florida. On a smaller scale it’s the same for St. Petersburg Web Design. just because you are in St. Petersburg and you tell Google doesn’t mean that the national companies aren’t fighting hard for your spot.

He doesn’t really give away a lot of tips but he does highlight the challenges that most small businesses don’t understand.

That’s right, 55% of Americans used the internet to research candidates and issues in the last election.

If you are going to run for any office, from a local school board to President, remember this one thing:
It takes around 12 months to get a decent search engine presence.

the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 55% of Americans used the internet to not just ceck out a web page but:

• 45 percent of Internet users watched online videos related to politics or the election
• 33 percent of Internet users shared political content with others
• 52 percent of those on a social network used it for political purposes

By the way, it was only 11% in the 2000 elections. What do you think it’ll be by the 2012 elections?

If you have any doubt that a strong internet presence and an engaging website helped Obama secure the Presidency read this quote from the study:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama used the Internet to mobilize an army of volunteers that helped him defeat Republican John McCain in the November 4 election.

Obama supporters tended to be more engaged online than McCain backers, the study found. While 26 percent of Obama supporters active on the Internet posted their own thoughts or other content in an online forum, only 15 percent of McCain-backing Internet users participated, for example.

Still think you can run for office without at least one website?
Well, than keep thinking that, I guess we don’t need leaders who are so out of touch with the populace.

Writing about the Coleman data leak is going to be tough to do without sounding like a paranoid extreme left winger or an extreme right winger. Let me assure I’ve alway been disappointed with both parties and I am a confirmed independent.

With that out of the way, lets get on with the paranoia:

The Main stream media is definitely reporting untruths about this story. They are saying that the data leak was the result of a hacker and that federal crime has been committed. This is entirely untrue. the only person that’s even saying this is Colemans attorney, well I’m sure some extreme supporters are saying this too.

What really happened.
The developers running colemans site asking for donations to his legal fund screwed up the site. It left the website down for an extended period of time.
While investigating Adria Richards stumbled across the websites database completley unsecured. she did this with a web browser and nothing else. This is not hacking. This is “surfing the internet”.

links:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/19912.html

http://www.google.com/search?q=Adria+Richards&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

http://butyoureagirl.com/2009/01/28/did-norm-coleman-fake-his-own-website-death/

http://washingtonindependent.com/33674/norm-colemans-donor-database-exposed-campaign-claims-political-motives

Obama just took the initiative to ask the general public to submit questions to him online, others members of the general public will read the questions and rate them. The President will ask some of the most popular and well rated.
This article resume’s after the video:

This online interaction between President and Citizens is a lot like the traditional means. I don’t why the guy in the interview seems obsessed with marijuana, but he has the point all wrong, in fact he’s proving my point.
Read the rest of this entry »